"Status."
---
[Revenge System
USER(s): Riley Snow | ???
Level: 0 (Origin Level: 4)
Personality: 76% | 24%
Emotions: PARTIALLY LOCKED
Wrath: 19%↑
Intelligence: 43 (+32)↑
Strength: 24
Agility: 31
Stamina: 20
Ether: 500 | 500
Charm: -12%
Aspect: ???
+Vengeful Soul [Active]
+Plausibility [Locked]
.... [Read More]]
---
"Revenge system," Riley muttered.
He didn't need to be a genius to understand what that meant.
Could this be the original purpose of the system? He frowned at the thought, but after a moment, shook his head. More likely it had adjusted itself to match his desire, a desire that seemed to be growing by the second. This maddening, bone-deep need to make them pay. All of them.
He scrolled past that line and stopped.
"Users?" Riley picked up on the word immediately. The system was using the plural, and that meant exactly one thing: he was not the only one inside this body. Something else was here with him.
He had a feeling it was not the original Riley, mainly because the system had not given the second entity a name, just a question mark. Whatever it was, it either had no identity the system could read, or it had one it wasn't willing to share.
He moved on.
"Origin Level 4." He said it quietly, like saying it out loud might help it make sense. It didn't. "That's not right. What the hell happened?"
That was a question that needed an answer.
Because of Riley's abnormal aspect, one no one could identify or explain, he had never been able to use it. No one knew what it was, let alone how he was supposed to activate it. So he had done the only thing left available to him: he had poured every hour, every drop of effort he had, into his swordsmanship and word glyphs. It was always an uphill fight. An aspect, no matter how weak or poorly understood, was still a passive multiplier that gave its user a natural edge. Not having one meant he was always running behind just to keep pace.
But that absence had forced him to compensate differently. While others leaned on their aspects, Riley had channeled everything into expanding his ether core, and it had worked. He had climbed to level seven while most of his peers were still grinding through the mid to late stages of level four, or barely cracking level five. At the academy, that gap was the only thing that had kept him relevant. He might not have had an aspect, but on a battlefield he was not someone you dismissed. His experience, his skill, and his level had combined into something real, something that had forced even the protagonist to struggle when trying to kill him, even with backup.
Not that any of that was going to hold forever. The story's canon had barely begun. Jayden would become a powerhouse. So would Diana, Arable, Selene, and the rest of that treacherous crew. It was only a matter of time.
But that was beside the point.
The problem, the immediate and deeply irritating problem, was that somehow, between dying and waking up in chains, he had dropped levels. All the way back down to level four. Either the system was misreading something, or something had genuinely gone wrong with his core.
"But I feel stronger," he muttered, clenching his fist, frowning at the way his own body contradicted the number in front of him. He sat with that contradiction for a moment, then let it go. He would come back to it.
The next line was the one that made him uncomfortable.
Two users. And now, apparently, two personalities.
"If two people are sharing this body," he said slowly, working through it, "then whoever has the higher percentage probably controls it. Seventy-six to twenty-four. That's me." He paused. "Or at least, it should be."
But that raised a worse question. If control could shift, if the percentages could change, then had the other personality already taken over at some point? Was that how he had ended up here, at the Falls, instead of wherever he was supposed to be?
Just the thought of it was uncomfortable in a way he could not quite name. The idea that you could lose your body without warning, with no memory of what it did while you were gone, was a deeply unsettling thing to sit with.
"System," he said. "What is the second personality?"
He waited.
For ten years inside this world, Riley had tried every angle he could think of to get the interface to respond to him directly. He had spoken to it during life-or-death situations, tried to negotiate with it when missions were impossible, even talked to it in the quiet moments when loneliness was the only thing keeping him company. Not once, in all ten years, had it ever replied.
Maybe that would be different now that it had finally activated.
It wasn't.
Silence, same as always.
"Right. Keywords only," he muttered, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He looked back at the screen floating in front of him.
The question marks sat there, patient and unbothered, giving him nothing.
"So what exactly are you?" he said quietly, more to himself than to the system.
No answer came.